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Waste
Waste may pose a threat to the environment, is subject to legislation, and can also be turned into a source of revenue. The best approach is to emphasize prevention and eliminate waste at the design stage (see Ladder Concept in Appendix 4).
Landfill: reduce the amount of landfilled waste below 5% of our total waste by 2005
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LANDFILL
Landfilling waste is becoming more expensive because of tougher legislation and the increasing scarcity of sites. We separate our waste into more than 30 different categories, facilitating re-use and recycling, thus reducing the quantities that go to landfill. Waste sent to landfill has decreased by a factor of almost three from 1994 to 2000. The flat trend for 2000 is due to building waste from new and expanded buildings.
LANDFILLED WASTE
Reuse or recycle at least 80% of our manufacturing and packing waste by end 1999, and 95% by end 2005
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MANUFACTURING
Recycling waste is less expensive than discarding it. The graph shows the achievement obtained in manufacturing waste reuse/recycling. (Building waste from new and expanded buildings has slightly affected the total waste figure).
Examples of some of our actions to improve our waste reuse and recycling include:
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sludges produced by the waste water treatment plants are sent to the cement and brick industry
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deflashing waste powders are sent for precious metals recovery
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extensions of laser deflashing to avoid resin flash waste
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cleaning and reusing gloves and overshoes, where possible. For example, in 2000 at our site in Tours, France, we reused 26% of gloves (saving $15,000) and 34% of overshoes (saving $16,000)
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reject silicon wafers are increasingly used in solar panels, which avoids landfilling and resmelting
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MANUFACTURING WASTE
(Reused and Recycled )
PACKING WASTE
We have arrangements with recycling and packaging companies to take back packing tubes and plastic trays for recycling.
We buy a mix of recycled and new plastic trays. This saves money, for example, our site at Malta has more than halved its costs between 1998 and 2000 and Singapore spends 75% less on trays. At our Catania site, wafer packing is reused for inter-company shipments, saving approximately $1.1 million a year.
The following chart shows the amount of packing waste (ie boxes, plastic tubes, plastic trays used for transporting products) that is recycled and reused.
PACKING WASTE
(Recycling + Reused vs Total)
RESTRICTION OF HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS
Detailed information on all ST products is provided to customers, including a technical description of the chemical and physical characteristics of ST packages.
We have also launched the ECOPACK® program which is intended to identify environmental friendly packaging materials. With this program ST will to eliminate hazardous materials (lead, antimony and bromine)
in the manufacturing of integrated circuits and discrete packaging. This requires the re-engineering of solder joint technology and the substitution of bromine and antimony as flame retardant in the encapsulation of plastic packages.
The program was started in 1997 with the introduction of Nickel-Palladium plating of SO packages. However due to the increasing cost of Palladium (a 15-fold increase in 3 years) new directions have been developed based on Pb-free Sn-alloys. They will be extended to the large majority of “leaded” packages in 2001-2002.
A Pb-free BGA (Ball Grid Array) package was developed and validated in 1999. In 2000 the first TSOP (Thin Small Outline Package) using bromine/antimony-free molding compounds was qualified and is now in full production.
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